In 1990 I saw Twin Peaks and it changed my life. I didn’t realise at the time that there hadn’t been a TV show like it before, and honestly, there still hasn’t. It felt like someone had broadcast a dream, or a shared hallucination. The weirdness, the music, the unnerving calm, it all stuck with me in a way nothing else on TV ever had. It made the surreal feel normal and the normal feel deeply strange. That tension still finds its way into my work.

There haven’t been many shows like Twin Peaks since, but The OA comes close. It has that same sense of mystery, the feeling that something bigger is going on just out of reach. Both shows seem more interested in emotion and atmosphere than plot, and both manage to be deeply personal while also feeling cosmic.

Severance blew me away. It takes a simple, surreal premise, what if you could separate your work self from your outside self? and pushes it into something deeply unsettling, oddly funny, and emotionally devastating. The whole thing feels like it was made by someone who’s watched Twin Peaks on loop and then had a panic attack in an office cubicle. The production design is stunning, clean, clinical, and just off enough to keep you uncomfortable. And the pacing is hypnotic, slowly dragging you deeper into a world that feels both sterile and nightmarish. Like The OA, it asks huge questions about identity, memory, and what it means to be whole. But it does it with this creeping dread, like there’s something terrible waiting just out of frame.

They’re not just TV shows, they’re experiences.